TuxRadar recently compared the six most
popular Linux distributions in different categories. It's our pleasure
to announce that Debian not only won the categories Customization,
Community and Performance, but also won the overall
prize of best Linux distro of 2011! We are especially pleased
to have won in the community category, or to cite TuxRadar:
There's more to a Linux community than just numbers.

Similarly, Debian was named the Top
Production Server Distro by Carla Schroder at linux.com: I've been spoiled by Debian, which
never needs to be reinstalled but can be upgraded forever, [..] Debian supports
more packages than any other distribution, so it's rare to not find whatever
you want just an apt-get install away. Many thanks, Carla!

Neil McGovern sent some Bits
from the Release Team.
First of all, Neil explained that the release goals are areas of
functionality which developers would like to see as an aim for the next
release and should be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, timely
and not limited in effects to only one set of packages. In addition, each release goal
must have an advocate for tracking progress. A list of current goals is
available on the related
wiki page. Another interesting topic discussed in the mail is the
development of CUT (Constantly Usable Testing) and of a rolling
version of Debian: the Release Team is skeptical on the creation of a new
suite as the most efficient way to improve the release process. Anyway,
certain aspects of the CUT/Rolling proposal are interesting, so the
Release Team invites people who are interested to run the suite.
Neil also talked about improvements to the experimental branch
of Debian, in order to avoid the slowing down of new features in
unstable, as well as various other interesting topics such as the 0-day NMU
policy, architecture
re-qualification and the packages removal process.
For a general overview of recent Release Team work, you can also
watch the video recording of Bits
from the Release Team, held during DebConf11.

Bdale Garbee blogged about some recent
progress in the FreedomBox project. During DebConf11 in Banja Luka,
some FreedomBox developers worked together, fixing various
problems: Bdale developed freedom-maker, a lightweight toolset
to build FreedomBox software images, which is now available on the git
repository of the project. Jonas Smedegaard continued to work on an
alternate packaging toolset, boxer.
Thanks to Marvell, who provided the source code, Bdale packaged two userspace programs necessary for
configuring and monitoring firmware provided for the uAP wireless chip
used in the DreamPlug: they are now available in Debian as uaputl and uapevent. Still on the topic of
DreamPlug, Clint Adams and Jason Cooper worked on adding support for the
DreamPlug to upstream u-boot while Héctor Orón and Nick Bane
analyzed the current state of patches from Marvell and Globalscale used
to support the DreamPlug against both upstream and current Debian kernel
sources. Mirsal Ennaime worked on the technology for package
configuration (using debconf and Config::Model) and there were
interesting discussions about identity and trust management, summarized
on the
related wiki page.
For more information about the FreedomBox project, please visit the official website or watch
the recording of Bdale's FreedomBox
Progress Report, delivered at DebConf11.

Asheesh Laroia announced that the
new version of mentors.debian.net is finally available.
The new site
provides a lot of interesting features such as the ability to
see package quality on the package page, and support for comments and
mail notifications. The site runs with a more maintainable codebase than
the old one, and is also characterized by a new layout, which is the same
as the main Debian website. Asheesh wants to thank all the people who have worked
during the last year to achieve this result: Jan Dittberner, Christoph Haas,
Johnny Lamb, David Paleino, Andrey Rahmatullin, Kalle Söderman,
Christine Spang, Arno Töll, Wolodja Wentland, Paul Wise and Serafeim Zanikolas.

Aurelien Jarno blogged about the birth of a new Debian port:
s390x, the 64-bit version of the s390 port.
The s390 port is actually 31-bit from the address point of view
(one bit is reserved for address space extension from 24 to 31 bits),
so each process is limited to 2 GB only, explains Aurelien.
But, as nowadays there are applications which need more than 2 GB
(especially on mainframes), the new s390x can be really useful.
Aurelien had already done the bootstrap of the architecture, so now an
autobuilder has been started and more than 65% of
all packages have been built. The main issues are currently packages which fail
to build from source due to linker,
gcc-4.6
and curl
changes. For more information you can take a look at the list
of bugs blocking the s390x port.

Neil Williams sent an interesting
mail regarding the possible integration of Emdebian Grip into Debian.
Emdebian is an official
sub-project of Debian for running Debian on embedded devices; the aim
of the project is to provide minimized Debian packages with the same
sort of consistency that Debian itself offers, to be installed on various types of
devices. One of the Embedian flavours is Emdebian Grip, which can be
described as a smaller Debian-compatible distro with optimized packages.
During DebConf11, discussions took place in order to integrate Emdebian
Grip directly into the main Debian archive and release process.
The integration would involve parallel suites (unstable-grip,
testing-grip, stable-grip, etc) with a restricted (and binary only)
package set. There's also an interesting mail
about Emdebian Grip policy. For more information, please visit
the detailed
summary of the discussion.

Kenshi Muto announced an update
of the backported debian-installer for Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 "Squeeze". Updated images are
available on his images archive page. These images
contain kernel version 2.6.39 (bpo.2), updates disk controller drivers such as hpsa
(by updating kernel-wedge) and updates firmware packages (such as bnx2x). Images are
available both for i386 and amd64 architectures. Please note that these are
unofficial images and you should use them only if you really need this.

debian-experimental-changes
— Notices about uploaded packages for the experimental
distribution, from developers, buildds and dak (the Debian Archive
Kit).

The results of SPI elections have
been declared: Jimmy Kaplowitz, Clint Adams and Robert Brockway were
elected to the SPI board. SPI (Software in the Public Interest) is a
non-profit organization founded to help organizations develop and
distribute open hardware and software; for more information on what SPI
is and what it does, you can watch the SPI
BoF, held during the last DebConf.

Ansgar Burchardt announced that the
Debian archive now supports xz compression for both source and binary
packages. However, packages in the base system (i.e packages with
Priority: required) and their dependencies must use gzip as
otherwise debootstrap will be unable to install a system.

Jaldhar Harshad Vyas sent an update on the
status of the Debian GNU/Minix port. The main news is that dpkg has been
successfully ported, while the initial bootstrapping is quite difficult
due to circular dependencies; nonetheless Jaldhar said that a pre-alpha
version will be distributed in a month.

Aigars Mahinovs published
an interesting picture, taken in Banja Luka at DebConf11, with people
wearing official DebConf t-shirts from DebConf3 up to DebConf11.

Thom Holwerda blogged about AmigaOne
X1000 being shipped to beta testers, which will be delivered with a
Nemo motherboard assembled by Varisys, a UK company. The good news for Debian
users is that Varisys has Debian 6.0 Squeeze running on the
Nemo board.

Debian's Stable Release Team released an update announcement for the packages:
clamav,
clive.
Please read it carefully and take the proper measures.

Debian's Volatile Team released an update announcement for the package:
clamav.
Please read it carefully and take the proper measures.

Please note that these are a selection of the more important security
advisories of the last weeks. If you need to be kept up to date about
security advisories released by the Debian Security Team, please
subscribe to the security mailing
list (and the separate backports
list, and stable updates
list or volatile
list, for Lenny, the oldstable distribution) for announcements.

Please help us create this newsletter. We still need more volunteer writers
to watch the Debian community and report about what is going on. Please see the
contributing
page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail
at debian-publicity@lists.debian.org.